Bad research, over-protective society and a hoax website conspire to encourage a Californian city to put forward a motion for a ban on dihydrogen monoxide :

And it got worse: dihydrogen monoxide is lethal if inhaled, causes severe burns in its gaseous state, and is the major component in acid rain. Prolonged exposure to solid dihydrogen monoxide can cause severe tissue damage. It can, said the city council report, “threaten human safety and health”.

I was reading through the Gentoo forums for information on ebuilds for Gnome 2.6, which was released a couple of days ago. While I was doing this I came across a post that was complaining that Nautilus (the Gnome file manager) had a certain behavior. The poster was complaining that when you move a folder, if there is a folder with the same name in the way, nautilus overwrites the old folder with the new one. In Windows and KDE (apparently), the new folder’s contents are merged with the old ones. The poster complained that the nautilus method was “wrong” because it didn’t merge the folders.

At this post there is an image of a Windows Longhorn dialog that invites you to:

Type in a word, phrase or question to search for anything: documents, email, […], people, or the internet.

You’ll note that you can search for the internet. Not a site, but the internet as a whole! Hmm, maybe I lost it down the back of the sofa?

The more pedantic amongst you may also notice the curious use of commas in “word, phrase or question” and “people, or the internet”. Tsk, tsk, at least be consistent =)

Okay, so the new desktop image. It’s already provoked a few questions and it’s only been on the site a couple of hours, so here is an explaination.

There’s an indie club night I go to where they take pictures and stick them up on their website. We take a look through the pictures every so often. This is one picture that reflects the general quirky-yet-cool atmosphere they have at the night. I just have the picture there because it reminds me of the cool times I had at the place; not as some people have posited that I have some claim on the girl: she’s just a random.

The BBC are on the ball: they have RSS feeds for all their main news pages. Good to see RSS in a place other than weblogs.

This is the kind of thing that RSS should really excell at; rather than being obliged to visit a few news sites, I can just check the headlines in my RSS reader (liferea if you are curious) and check out the ones that are of interest.